Octavia E. Butler born - June 22, 1947

On this day in 1947, science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler was born.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey y'all, I'm Eves and Welcome to the
Stand History Class, a podcast that brings you a little
tidbit of history every day. Today is June. The day

(00:22):
was June n Science fiction author Octavia E. Butler was
born in Pasadena, California. Butler addressed themes of gender, sexuality,
and race through her speculative fiction. Over the course of
her writing career, she received several awards, including the Hugo
and Nebula Awards. Butler's mother was a domestic worker, and

(00:44):
growing up, Butler recognized the racism and economic inequity that
affected her family. By the time she was ten, she
was already writing her own stories, and she was interested
in science fiction magazines and stories. As a young adult,
Butler pursuit passed besides writing and work temporary jobs, but
she wrote when she wasn't working. Through the open door

(01:07):
program at the Writer's Guild, Butler was able to attend
a class taught by science fiction author Harlan Ellison. He
encouraged her to pursue writing further by attending the Clarion
Science Fiction Writer's Workshop in Pennsylvania. Though Ellison had offered
to publish one of her stories in an anthology. That
anthology was never published. When she left Clarion, she began

(01:28):
working on the novels that became part of the Patterness series.
The first book in the series, published by Double Day
in nineteen seventy six, was pattern Master. In the book,
telepathic people known as patternists are dominant over mutes or
non telepathic humans, as well as over mutated humans called
clay arcs. The next two books in the series, Mind

(01:50):
of My Mind and Survivor were published in nineteen seventy
seven and nineteen seventy eight. The books sold will but
she took a break from the series to write Candred.
In the novel, a black woman named Dana travels back
in time to slavery era Maryland. There, she meets a
white ancestor whom she has to repeatedly rescue to make
sure that he survives. Butler had trouble placing the book

(02:13):
with a publisher because it didn't fit neatly into the
science fiction category, but in nineteen seventy nine, Double Day
published Kindred as fiction. The book was received well when
it was published, and it became a text that students
read in high schools across the US. After Kindred, Butler
continued to publish books in the Pattern Master series, including

(02:33):
Wild Seed and Clay's Arc. Many of her characters were
black women, and she explored themes like control and in
post colonialism and dystopian settings. In four she won a
Hugo Award for the short story Speech Sounds, and Blood
Child won the Nebula, Hugo and Locust Awards. Butler worked
on the Xeno Genesis trilogy in the late nineteen eighties,

(02:55):
and in the nineteen nineties she published Parable of the
Sober and Parable of the Talents, which followed the protagonist
Lauren Alamina as she escapes a walled community and fouls
a new one. Butler once said quote, I don't write
utopia science fiction because I don't believe that imperfect humans
can form a perfect society. Fledgling, a science fiction vampire novel,

(03:17):
published in two thousand five, was Butler's last publication. She
died of a stroke in two thousand six. I'm Eve Jeffcote,
and hopefully you know a little more about history today
than you did yesterday. And if you have any commerce
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(03:39):
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